Burn in hell, EA... you charged me within seconds of launch for a game that didn't work, you wouldn't offer a refund, you banned me when I did a chargeback through my bank, then made my bank give you the money anyways, arguing that there was "no reasonable expectation of functionality" when I preordered. So now you have my money, and I'm still banned. Fark you, fark everything you do, I'll never give you another penny again. I had bought several EA games, and made microtransactions prior to the launch... since then, exactly 0 dollars to EA from my gaming budget. You're a bunch of farking thieves... if you wnatme to forgive you, start by giving my money back, then *maybe* we can talk about future games, provided you acknowledge a very reasonable expectation of functionality.

thomps:is that different from other simcity games though? i seem to remember simcity4 scaling much that same way?

For this version, EA was promoting that "Every Sim, every car, every building has a purpose in SimCity". If they are fudging the population, then they are lying about the simulation aspect of the game. Add on the fact that the Sims just go "home" to the closest building with space, and the lie is more evident. The game doesn't do what EA claims.

I love the Sim series (well, everything but "the Sims") to the point that I even played and loved SimTower. Large-scale simulation without a combat system shoehorned in for no reason where you're just trying to build a functional whatever is something like half my childhood and years of my adulthood have been wasted on. I still have a copy of 4 on my current machine, and I even willingly played the clusterfark that was Societies.

However, I learned the lesson of Diablo III and no longer buy video games on launch date if there's any amount of network connectivity involved, to gain an idea of both the functionality of the system and the developer's response to the inevitable bugs, and what it says about their attitude toward maintaining the game.

I do not currently and do not plan to ever own the most recent SimCity.

//I phrase it this way because of the comment in TFA about 'an enormous number of loyal fans'. My point is, that's me, and your game was so bad that I've intentionally avoided buying it. That's what's happened to those 'loyal fans'. The 2 million is just the bare number of idiots a game with that level of media presence gets on name recognition alone. Even WoW is still running higher than that, and they've resorted to kung-fu panda.

And I realized the last game I actually purchased on the list was Team Fortress 2 (back before it was F2P...somewhere around it's release in 2007...and I honestly didn't know that was distributed by EA), and absolutely loved that game.

Even more astonishing to me, was that the next previous game I purchased from them was SimCity 2000 back around 1993 when it came out.

I guess I did purchase one of the Madden games for the PS3...but I got it used so I'm not counting that... :)

/guess I can't complain about them after all...they've literally had almost no impact on me directly...//At least I can honestly say I'm not contributing to their madness either...

This Looks Fun:Oh wow. That's awful. The physics I never had a problem with. Those smaller details definitely take it from reality to "simulator," but that they are missing never ruined the game for me. In fact, I used a lot of what I learned from GT when I went on an actual track and didn't wreck, so they got something right. Up to GT4, they were always the best available for console. And I went X360 instead of PS3, so I never bothered with 5 and Forza seemed like a poor-man's (overpriced) GT knock-off.

Forza's actually taken the lead for consoles. It basically started out as a GT imitator and then surpassed it in many ways. GT6 is now adapting some of Forza's innovations, such as using proprietary tire manufacturer data. You might try FM4. The jury's still out on FM5, most people I know aren't getting an XBox One.

This Looks Fun:As far as CARS, I haven't really looked into racing games in about 4 years, so I'm not totally current on newer projects.

It's pretty interesting and you may want to check it out. The developers actually left EA Games because EA wouldn't stop interfering in their projects (Slightly Mad Studios, produced Shift 1 and Shift 2.) So they started Project Community Assisted Racing Simulation with crowd funding. It's due in 2014 on all consoles and PC (current and next-gen, XBox 360 and PS3 will be limited to 30 FPS.)